Public schools improve under competition from private schools, study says

Public schools respond to competition from private schools by improving the quality of instruction, a new study finds.

US-based education researchers Jay Greene and Marcus Winters looked at Florida's A+ programme that offers a voucher to transfer to a private school to all the students in schools that chronically fail the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. Schools faced the threat of vouchers only if they were failing. They could remove the threat by improving their test scores.

The researchers found that between 2001-03, voucher-eligible schools made the largest gain among five categories of schools, including in mathematics where they improved by 15.1 scale-score points more than the rest of Florida's public schools.

The diagram below, taken from the study, shows the study's five categories of school and the gains they made in test scores.

The report is at this web page.